They continued south along Karl-Marx Straße and approached the hookah lounge, Ember Berlin, which was at the base of a five-story apartment building. The ground-floor frontage was all glass and the place looked busy. A red neon sign that saidEMBER BERLIN HOOKAH LOUNGEspanned the length of the building.
They entered. The place was kind of gaudy, with white vinyl seating,mirrored walls, and blue and purple club lights splashed across large Turkish tapestries hanging from the ceiling. Middle Eastern pop music was playing low in the background.
The clientele was mixed—a couple of clusters of old Middle Eastern men puffing away at hookahs and drinking tea, and a few groups of diverse twenty- and thirty-somethings smoking and sharing pitchers of beer.
A Turkish man in his forties wearing an electric-blue dress shirt and sporting greased-back hair approached them, smiling as he gestured to the tables. “Setz dich hin wo du willst.”
“Danke,” said Brodie.
They found a two-person round table toward the back and sat down, and the man brought over a couple of menus and said something to them in German.
Brodie said, “We’d like a hookah. Do you have apple?”
The man nodded. “Apfel, ja. Uh… drink? Beer?”
“Ja,” said Brodie. “Zwei Pils.”
“Warsteiner?”
“My favorite.”
The man nodded, took the menus, and walked off.
Taylor said, “I haven’t smoked a hookah since college.”
“The synthetic flavors will take you back.”
“And I haven’t had a man order for me without asking what I wanted since before that, in Tennessee.”
“This is a real nostalgia trip for you.”
Taylor looked around the place. “Do we think our friend came here?”
“Well, if he came to Neukölln to meet someone in relation to an Islamic terrorism investigation, this seems more like the place for that than a Vietnamese noodle shop or a loud, trendy nightclub.”
“Assuming he came to this neighborhood for a meeting. But why then go through the park, which is north of here? After the meeting, he could have doubled back to the train station he’d arrived from.”
Brodie shrugged.
Taylor shook her head. “Doesn’t feel right. The meet—if there was a meet—was in the park. Or was supposed to be in the park.”
Well, this was all useless speculation unless and until they got some realIntel. Brodie looked over at their host, who was now sitting near the door. The man yawned and looked at his watch.
Brodie checked his own watch. Ten fifty-five. “Let’s see if there’s a changing of the guard at eleven.”
Another Turkish man, a lanky guy in his mid-twenties wearing a red button-down shirt and jeans, entered from a back room carrying two pints of beer. He placed them on their table and smiled. “Enjoy.”
“Danke,” said Taylor.
They watched as the young man returned to the back room, then emerged a moment later with a small pot full of coals and a pair of tongs. He went around the room replacing the coals atop the guests’ hookahs, then said something to the older man at the front. The older guy got up, threw on a thick coat, and left.
Brodie watched as the young man returned to the back room.
Taylor said, “I guess there’s our night shift.”
In a minute the young man re-emerged with their hookah and placed it on the table. He put a few hot coals on top of the tobacco bowl, then used a plastic mouthpiece from his pocket to take a few deep drags to get the coals going. He exhaled a long puff into the ceiling, then removed his mouthpiece, placed the hose on the table, and gave them each their own mouthpieces. “Can I bring you anything else?”
Brodie gestured at an empty chair. “Do you have a minute?”
